Hi. Please rate my Analysis of an Issue Essay. The topic is a sample from Kaplan GMAT Premier 2011.
Issue:
"The invention of the Internet has created more problems than it has solved. Most people would have a higher quality of life had the Internet never been invented."
Response:
Many people debate whether the invention of the Internet has caused the quality of people's lives to increase or to decrease. Since its widespread adoption in the late 20th century, the internet has changed global lifestyles beyond recognition. On the whole, these changes have been for the better rather than for the worse.
The biggest improvement in peoples' lifestyles caused by the internet is a change in the way they communicate. A person born after the mid-nineties may not even be able to grasp how people used to communicate when there was no email. In both professional and personal lives, the time taken by people to exchange ideas and information has decreased exponentially, thanks to the internet's unprecedented ability to transmit data quickly. A message that used to take around a week to deliver from one part of the country to another now takes less than a second. Thus, the Internet has made distances lose their meaning. This change has been so much as to render most older means of communications such as handwritten letters, telegrams and office-memos obsolete.
Another area where people have greatly benefited from the Internet is education and learning. The ubiquitous nature of the internet is helping to increase the worldwide penetration of educational information. The internet offers educationists a platform to take their material outside a physical academic world into a vastly more reachable virtual world. People who previously either could not afford education or lived in areas where quality education was not available can now access some of the world's best universities' resources online, many of which are free. An example of such an initiative is one from MIT, called Open CourseWare, where MIT offers many of its courses' lectures notes and audios as free content, in a structured and organised manner. This democratisation of knowledge has certainly improved peoples' lifestyles.
The internet has not just created a better environment for communcation and learning, but also for trading. E-commerce, as online trading is termed, has cut short the time and effort required by people to exchange goods and services. Websites such as Ebay let people buy and sell new and old products without the people leaving the comfort of their homes. Many e-commerce websites also exist, which target specific goods and services. The famous enterprise Amazon.com lets people purchase books from its website; and the website paypal.com lets people create virtual accounts where they can store credits for shopping on other websites. The application of e-commerce has not just fulfilled a need, but has also created a new industry in itself.
Like most revolutionary technologies, the internet too has its share of disadvantages. Some people complain that it has made us lazy and over-reliant on itself. They say that people rarely get up from their seats to get a job done and that this is affecting peoples' physical and mental health. Also, the internet has been blamed for making some people introvert by letting them prefer communicating from behind the safety of a computer screen rather than in person. These disadvantages, however, are minor and should be solved by personal determination rather than by eliminating the internet altogether. thus, the internet's advantages outnumber and outweigh its disadvantages by a very large margin, making it a very important technology that has changed peoples' quality of life for the better.
Issue:
"The invention of the Internet has created more problems than it has solved. Most people would have a higher quality of life had the Internet never been invented."
Response:
Many people debate whether the invention of the Internet has caused the quality of people's lives to increase or to decrease. Since its widespread adoption in the late 20th century, the internet has changed global lifestyles beyond recognition. On the whole, these changes have been for the better rather than for the worse.
The biggest improvement in peoples' lifestyles caused by the internet is a change in the way they communicate. A person born after the mid-nineties may not even be able to grasp how people used to communicate when there was no email. In both professional and personal lives, the time taken by people to exchange ideas and information has decreased exponentially, thanks to the internet's unprecedented ability to transmit data quickly. A message that used to take around a week to deliver from one part of the country to another now takes less than a second. Thus, the Internet has made distances lose their meaning. This change has been so much as to render most older means of communications such as handwritten letters, telegrams and office-memos obsolete.
Another area where people have greatly benefited from the Internet is education and learning. The ubiquitous nature of the internet is helping to increase the worldwide penetration of educational information. The internet offers educationists a platform to take their material outside a physical academic world into a vastly more reachable virtual world. People who previously either could not afford education or lived in areas where quality education was not available can now access some of the world's best universities' resources online, many of which are free. An example of such an initiative is one from MIT, called Open CourseWare, where MIT offers many of its courses' lectures notes and audios as free content, in a structured and organised manner. This democratisation of knowledge has certainly improved peoples' lifestyles.
The internet has not just created a better environment for communcation and learning, but also for trading. E-commerce, as online trading is termed, has cut short the time and effort required by people to exchange goods and services. Websites such as Ebay let people buy and sell new and old products without the people leaving the comfort of their homes. Many e-commerce websites also exist, which target specific goods and services. The famous enterprise Amazon.com lets people purchase books from its website; and the website paypal.com lets people create virtual accounts where they can store credits for shopping on other websites. The application of e-commerce has not just fulfilled a need, but has also created a new industry in itself.
Like most revolutionary technologies, the internet too has its share of disadvantages. Some people complain that it has made us lazy and over-reliant on itself. They say that people rarely get up from their seats to get a job done and that this is affecting peoples' physical and mental health. Also, the internet has been blamed for making some people introvert by letting them prefer communicating from behind the safety of a computer screen rather than in person. These disadvantages, however, are minor and should be solved by personal determination rather than by eliminating the internet altogether. thus, the internet's advantages outnumber and outweigh its disadvantages by a very large margin, making it a very important technology that has changed peoples' quality of life for the better.
